Saturday, 29 December 2012

Preparing to go on holiday recently I downloaded three books onto my Kindle. One fiction, two non. For the latter two I downloaded the preview before committing to a purchase. This is a useful feature, but the problem with previews is that they generally start at Page 1 (no really) and consist largely of preamble - preface, acknowledgements, introduction, yada yada - with very little content by which to judge the remainder of the book. In a real shop of course I would have flicked through the book haphazardly to determine whether it was what I was after. As it turned out neither of these were. I didn't read much of them, and I doubt I ever will.

It was at this point that something occurred to me that, in retrospect, is so blindingly obvious that I will reject any claims of my genius for conceiving the idea. It regards the purchase of electronic books and is almost too simple to make anything of it:

Only pay ... (wait for it) ... for what you read.

That's it.

It would work like this. Say there is a 399-page book which costs £3.99. Of course, I don't know whether I'm going to like it or not: books are very subjective, especially fiction. No matter, though, because it costs nothing to download. (I could download a couple of dozen before a holiday, say). Only when I read Page 1 does it cost me anything, and only a penny at that; then I read Page 2 and it costs me another penny; and so on. If the book is good enough to keep me to the last then I will pay the full price (and be glad to); but if however I give up before the end of the first chapter then it'll only have cost me, say, 30p. Perfect. The holy grail of pricing policies.

But more than just benefitting the consumer in the obvious way it is the ultimate mechanism for driving quality into the output of the industry. If people people only have to commit to paying for what they read then they are more likely to try books by new or unknown writers. And, on the flip-side, if the latest 'best-seller' from an old favourite doesn't cut the mustard, and doesn't actually get read, then the author (and publisher) will only get paid accordingly. Big name authors (and non-authors!) could not afford to get lazy with their content and publishers could not afford to churn out rubbish riding on the author's celebrity.

The technology exists to implement this and, as with the ebook revolution itself, it would be another great step forward in levelling the playing field for all writers. Of course, the stuffy old publishing industry will resist the shift, because they are backward and greedy, and fearful that they might actually have to publish decent readable books, not just ones where the author's name on the cover is larger than the title.

But the likes of Kindle are powerful. Amazon could drive this revolution on its own, because no publisher could survive without them. Or maybe it will be one of the other ebook platforms that strike first. Because this could just be the edge they need to regain some ground.

Tuesday, 11 September 2012

If you didn't think Texas was crazy already; and if you didn't think the death penalty was crazy already; just consider this mind-blowing concept:

In Texas, they determine whether a murderer should face the death penalty based on whether s/he is intellectually impaired, which is defined as an IQ of lower than 70. Texas Puts Man With 61 IQ To Death

Okay, seems sensible enough, until you consider the implications:

So they give an IQ test to a defendant and say, "If you do well on this test, we'll kill you." It's fair to say there is a heck of an incentive to do badly, and luckily enough doing badly on an IQ test is really easy. In fact, if someone facing death by virtue of a high IQ score, is so dumb as to actually score highly, then they must be just intellectually impaired as those with a low score.

Friday, 8 June 2012

It's interesting how technology, as well as having the potential to propel us into the future, has the equal ability to bind us to the past. The need for 'backward compatibility' - either in technology itself or the people using it - often prevents us making those let's-just-scrap-it-and-start-again leaps forward (any Windows users over the last two decades will be painfully aware of this). It's not always a problem, of course, as with the most immediately obvious example: the layout of the buttons I'm striking right now. Mind-blowingly the QWERTY layout was first devised in 1870 (to prevent type-writers from jamming); and it'll be with us as long as we're still using our fingers for the job, because, well, it actually works pretty good. But sometimes the throwbacks aren’t so agreeable...

The origins of my current bugbear are back in 1985, which seems quite recent to some of us, but then let me remind those same people that Shakin' Stevens had the UK Christmas Number One that year; and even if he was aware of mobile phones at the time he certainly wasn't informed by text message, because they hadn't been invented yet. But this was the year that some bright spark first decided to add a short text messaging feature to the mobile telephony standard. And, to cut a long story short, eventually the boffins figured out how they could squeeze a whopping 160 characters (7-bit for the geeks) down the control channel usually used for setting up voice calls. SMS was born.

Now, I would never have expected that over a quarter of a century (and no more Shakin' Stevens No. 1s) later my creativity would still being constrained by that 1985 limitation. Not when I am texting - oh no, seamless linking of multiple SMS messages did away with that years ago. No, it's Twitter, I'm talking about. And because space has to be reserved for the username when sending out tweets as texts, the limit is even lower: 140 characters! That's 12.5% fewer than the bolted-on-at-the-last-minute 80's mobile texting technology.

Yeah, yeah, I get it. Micro-blogging. And yeah, yeah, I get it, many people around the world still use SMS to access Twitter. But, to be honest, tough. It's too late - the bird has flown. Few people accommodate those users now anyway - they are oblivious to them. A huge proportion of tweeters now circumvent the 140 character limit by just posting links to blogs (of the non-micro variety), which kinda defeats the point, and which people with non-smartphones can't access anyway.

So it's time to admit it. 140 characters just isn't enough. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting to remove the limit altogether, because I do buy into the concept. I just think the number was never right in the first place. So, let's bite the bullet and double it. Simple. Retweet #twitter280 if you agree and let's get it trending ... because length does matter!

Friday, 18 May 2012

Don’t get me wrong I’ve got nothing against ‘milking’. It brings back fond memories of A-Level economics. I think we called it ‘price differentiation over time’ back then, and it’s ubiquitous in the marketplace, from train tickets to PlayStations. But the publishing industry is the only example I can think of that feels it has to dress it up as a different product. In this resource-conscious time, the right thing to do is bring the paperback out immediately and steadily bring it down in price. It’s not the price I object to, it’s the form factor. Of course, I know, this is not something an individual author or even publisher has much control over – the industry ‘just doesn’t work that way’. But my concern is that this is another sign the industry is unwilling to move with the times, to defend itself. Those pesky indie- and self-publishers (ahem) have mobilised – and, believe me, they’re not packing hardbacks.

(This was written to elaborate on my recent tweets regarding what will likely be my last ever purchase of a novel as a physical book, Killer Move by Michael Marshall (Smith))

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

[Still trying my hand at those tabloid headlines - expecting a call from Murdoch any day]

So I posed a question in my last blog post:

What class of product generates value from thin air?

Well, with no further ado, the answer I had in mind was...

...ART.

Not everyone likes art, I know. But a lot - I'd say most - do. And the beauty of art (beyond the aesthetic kind) is that it can be owned at effectively zero cost. It can be enjoyed without being consumed, appreciated without depreciating. It is an asset. I'm not saying that if you are silly enough to buy a painting of a dot for ten grand that you'll ever recoup your outlay. But if you discover a piece you really like and you're willing to pay a couple of hundred quid for it, then you can pretty much guarantee that there are a thousand other people out there that would do likewise.

And it is this ability to be both consumer product and asset at the same time that makes it a very useful tool for redistributing wealth in a socially ethical way (unlike, for instance, the insane notion of a lottery!! - sorry pet hate).

Of course many artists face difficultly in getting their art seen by those thousands who might appreciate it. So a few months back, when I had my epiphany, I began work on a little project. And at long last it takes its first tentative steps into the real world.

The project is called: immaculart.

It's an art gallery. For your phone.

It's an app where you can browse and buy real art by real artists. And, also, for a more passive experience, you can allow the app to change your wallpaper periodically to a great piece of art from our collection.

Right now, it's just in a pilot phase, but it's live and you can try it out - only on Android at the moment I'm afraid. But if it goes well, it will be made available on other platforms and more features are in the pipeline.

So, if you like art, do download the app, give it a try and let me know your thoughts (or any problems). Or if know an artist, tell them to get in touch. This is a way of them getting their work out to the world.

Contact me on paul.newell@immaculart.com or any of my other email addresses :)

Monday, 2 April 2012

So we all know that encouraging people to spend money is one way of stimulating the economy. But that's about as limited a notion as trying to measure the extent of that stimulation via GDP. After all, having a car crash stimulates the economy, and adds to GDP (by virtue of all the medical treatment and car fixing involved), but no one's suggesting we encourage those. The problem here is in measuring output and not outcome (a really nice way of putting it borrowed from Umair Haque).

But this is all covering ground I've discussed before. The point that's important here is that what we spend our money on is crucial. We have lots of choices on that front, and their outcomes are all different, so you'll be glad to learn I am not going to begin analysing them all here. But in putting thought to this a little while ago I stumbled across a particular type of product with a very special property: it generates value from thin air.

Let's just consider the individual cost of buying a normal product. If you spend, say, £500 on a TV, how much has it cost you? £500? Well no, because you now have a TV, which has a value. But it's now secondhand, so scarily enough it's probably already depreciated 50%. So the actual monetary cost to you is about £250. Over time it will depreciate to nothing and will cost you the full £500, but over that time you will value the utility from owning it at far greater than that. So all is good. But not great. We generated some value and then saw it witter away into nothingness.

Now, diamonds are cool (of course) - as are many minerals. They don't depreciate. If you spend £500 on diamonds, then they are still worth £500. And over time they are likely to actually appreciate in value. Awesome. But, these already exist. All of them. There are only a finite number of diamonds in the world - that's why they hold their value. So there is no generation of value here - just the moving of it about a little. (Without going into detail, houses can be considered similarly. Because, it's mostly the land that gives a house its value, and that is finite also.)

What if there were a product that could be made from basic materials, such that it has added value over and above those materials (just like a TV), but that then appreciates in value over time? That would be ... really interesting. Why? Because, if person A (Alice) could make these things, and person B (Bob) wanted one, then a rather intriguing scenario ensues. If Alice has £20 and Bob has £500, and Alice can make a product from £20-worth of raw materials that Bob is happy to pay £500 for, then Alice now has £500 and Bob has something which is worth £500 (and will be worth even more in the future). We've generated permanent value from nowhere!

Thursday, 29 March 2012

(See how I've heeded the lessons of good journalism by opening with a snappy but exaggerated claim which I'll go on to caveat heavily until its interest is eroded to nothing? Here I go...)

Okay, not just me, but the demographic to which I belong. And okay, not broke exactly (that was the bankers, we all know that), but at least left in tatters.

The thing that struck me about the UK's flailing attempts over the last fours years to save us from a financial meltdown, is that the two main waves of attack seemed oddly opposed. First we had Quantitative Easing Brown (which sounds dodgier than I'd hoped) with his plan to spend spend spend our way out of trouble; and then came Osbourne's message to tighten the purse strings and pay down the debt (both his and ours). It makes you wonder where we might be right now if we'd done nothing all along. But of course, it's more complicated than that. Well, actually, no it isn't more complicated, it's really simple. What we really need, is both. We need the people who have money, to spend it. And the people who don't have money ... wait for it ... to not spend it. That's it in essence, but trying to promote this behaviour via government policy isn't so easy.

This is where it becomes my fault. Because I am in the fortunate position (like many in fact) of having benefited from the Global Financial Crisis. Not life-changingly, but I still have a job ... and my mortgage rate is lower than ever. So, it is in part my responsibility to give something back. How? Well, I could buy a new car a year-or-so earlier than I was planning to; or upgrade my TV like I've being saying I would forever (12-year-old CRT still going strong!). And this extra-extravagance on my part would help, of course (if others like me did similar). But it's not really very sustainable. It's basically getting the economy going via the policy of throwing stuff out - which I can't begin to promote. It's also not a very direct stimulus. Buying Panasonic isn't going to greatly aid the local community.

But there is one other commodity that maybe I, and maybe lots of people who can afford to, should invest in more of ... time. Not investing time, but investing in time. Buying it. Because the nub of the problem is this. There are millions of people who can't find work, and there are millions of people who work too much. I am at the most financially secure of my life and yet I work longer hours now than I ever have, if you count the 2hrs commuting a day (something I said I would never ever do). There is enough work - it just needs to be shared out a little better. The most extreme method of redressing this inbalance is for more people - those who can afford it - to work part time. But I'm not suggesting this at all. For there is a way of buying time at a much lower price. In fact, there are hundreds. Especially if you are a low-skilled lazy-ass like me. Let me just reel some off...

Firstly, no brainer in my opinion. Get your groceries delivered. It costs five quid and saves an hour of your life every time; and give a packer and a driver a job. Next, get your windows cleaned by the local man with a bucket. Maybe consider a cleaner for the inside of your house too. Pay a youth to mow your lawn. And don't put aside that weekend to paint your house, get the decorators in, and take yourself to the seaside. Don't struggle with DIY tasks that an odd-job man on the next street can get done in a fraction of the time. You see, it's all about specializing. You do what you're good at every day at work. Offload some of the other jobs to other people. Go on, buy yourself some time - you've earned it. And the economy needs it.

Give yourself a break. Give someone else a job.

Addendum: Please don't take any of this the wrong way - (a) This is mostly directed at me (and a subset of the economy) and (b) I don't know what I'm talking about. Tomorrow, however, I genuinely will reveal how you can generate value from nothing! Quantitative easing, without the downside. Watch this blog.